Along with orator Eugene Debs and Congressman Victor L. Berger, Hillquit was one of the most recognized public faces of America's Socialist Party.

By Aaron Welt

One hundred years ago, a Jewish, immigrant Socialist almost became New York's mayor. For months, detractors watched in horror as the candidate, Morris Hillquit, galvanized much of the city. In April of that tumultuous year, President Woodrow Wilson had reversed course, and bucked popular opinion, asking Congress for permission to send U.S. troops to fight in the "Great War." Hillquit’s campaign galvanized antiwar sentiment in New York. It was also a flash-point for ethno-religious politics in the city. Jewish New Yorkers, in particular, sparred over what Hillquit’s improbable run meant for America’s increasingly immigrant Jewish population. The Socialist lost the election, accruing about half as many votes as the winner, Tammany Democrat John Hylan. But his campaign was a turning point for many communities in New York, and continues to leave its mark on the city.[1]

In 1973, thirty-three-year-old Dawn Harris addressed the graduating class of Manhattan Community College as its valedictorian. In her speech, Harris thanked “the brothers and sisters at CCNY” who had shut down the flagship campus of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1969 to demand, among other things, immediate open enrollment across the entire system. She also thanked “those who tried to discourage me” because it spurred her “to make sure that they didn’t count over-thirty, underprepared women with children out.” “I think I did it,” she told her classmates. “I know we did.”

The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American HeroBy Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 2016)​384 pages

Reviewed by R. Bryan Willits​The story of Thomas Francis Meagher ­– Irish revolutionary, exile, American Civil War general, and eventual governor of the Montana Territory – has long deserved to be told. In his 44 years on earth, Meagher careened his way over several continents, transgressed national and epochal boundaries, and became well acquainted with many of the influential individuals of his time, in effect becoming one himself. Telling the complex story of this man, and the pivotal moments in which he was involved, is what Timothy Egan set out to do in this biography, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero. There is no doubt that researching and incorporating such a vast breadth of material into this story was a major challenge. Egan nevertheless produced a highly readable volume accessible to a general audience. While this book has already earned significant acclaim, it is not without flaws.

Reviewed by ​Jacqueline BrandonCritics of neoliberalism have well established that disasters, be they economic, ecological, or political, create space for opportunistic restructuring. In post-Allende Chile as in post-Katrina New Orleans, free market ideologues, business interests, and neoconservative political regimes seized the chance to dismantle robust public services and unions, making the death of liberal civil society in the name of corporate oligarchy parading as bootstrap individualism. In mid-1970s New York City, deepening municipal debt and a waning commitment to the liberal politics established by the New Deal and Great Society coalesced in what has gone down in history as the narrowly avoided fiscal collapse of the city. This is the story Kim Phillips-Fein tells in Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Here, sandwiched between the sixties’ welfare state expansion and the eighties’ triumph of Reaganism, Phillips-Fein uncovers the complicated process by which once-liberal politicians and policymakers embraced a form of governance hollowed of public services and friendlier than ever to business leaders and the financial industry.

The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for LiberationBy Darrel Wanzer-SerranoTemple University Press (2016)

Reviewed by Lauren LeftyThe Young Lords have been enjoying their own nuevo despertar in the last few years, as a number of the city’s cultural institutions from El Museo del Barrio to the Bronx Museum hosted exhibits on the late sixties radical Puerto Rican organization. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation is a welcome addition to this reawakening as the first book-length treatment of the East Coast branch of the party, which also had bases in Newark and Philadelphia in addition to its founding chapter in Chicago. The New York Lords only existed for a brief moment from 1969 to 1976, as a “revolutionary nationalist, antiracist, anti-sexist group who advanced a complex political program featuring support for the liberation of all Puerto Ricans (on the island and in the United States), the broader liberation of all Third World people, equality for women, U.S. demilitarization, leftist political education, redistributive justice, and other programs [that] fit into their ecumenical ideology" (5). Yet as Wanzer-Serrano notes, quoting Raymond Williams, they nonetheless provide “resources of hope” for today’s activists and anyone interested in the history and theory of radical social movements. While this book was published before the political upheavals of 2016, it seems all the more relevant for the current moment.

In November 2015, a federal court sentenced New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to twelve years in prison on corruption charges. The most serious charge hinted at the close connections between Silver, a Lower East Side assemblyman for nearly three decades, and luxury real estate. According to court records, Silver persuaded two real estate developers, Glenwood Management and the Witkoff Group, to have one of his associates file assessments with the city to reduce the companies’ property taxes.[1] The prosecution also alleged that Silver worked with lobbyists to provide over one billion in tax breaks to Glenwood and prevented a drug treatment center from opening near one of the company’s residential buildings. In return, the associate siphoned off a portion of his legal fees to Silver and continued to assess more Glenwood buildings, an arrangement that netted the assemblyman roughly $700,000. In sum, prosecutors noted, “[Silver] postured himself as Mr. Tenant,” but remained “on a secret retainer to the landlords, to the wealthiest developer of real estate in New York City.”[2]

By Jason SokolHillary Clinton is not the first woman to attempt to shatter the highest glass ceiling. Perhaps her ascent will establish for some of her forerunners a more prominent place in American political history. Ellen Fitzpatrick’s recent book, The Highest Glass Ceiling, focuses on three such forerunners: Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith, and Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm ran for president in 1972, not only a pioneering female candidate, but also the first African American to mount a full-fledged national campaign for the presidency.​

​From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in AmericaBy Elizabeth HintonIllustrated. 449 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95.Reviewed by Michael R. Glass

When I was sixteen years old, a group of friends and I thought it would be fun to make “dry ice bombs,” a contraption where the pressure of the expanding gas pops a plastic bottle. It was, indeed, tons of fun, but when a neighbor heard the long bang, she thought it was a gunshot and called 911. After falling asleep on my friend’s couch, I woke up in the middle of the night to a police officer standing over me. “You’re under arrest,” he said.

By Michael W. Flamm​On Tuesday afternoon, July 21, 1964, Lyndon Johnson voiced his private suspicion to J. Edgar Hoover that communists were somehow behind the civil unrest in New York. Now on Wednesday morning the president’s fears seemed confirmed and amplified, even if the conspiracy charge was unfounded. As he ate breakfast in bed he skimmed several newspapers, including the Daily News. The article that immediately captured his attention was ‘‘Blame Hate Groups, Red & White, for Harlem Terror’’ by three reporters. They broke the news that a five-month investigation spearheaded by the FBI and detectives with the Bureau of Special Service (BOSS) unit -— the NYPD’s ‘‘Red Squad’’ —- had uncovered fifty paid operatives and a thousand ‘‘young fanatics dedicated to violence.’’ Their instructions: ‘‘Deploy! Incite!’’ According to an unnamed source the communist conspirators were ‘‘beatniks, crumbums, addicts, and thieves’’ who received payment in cash and narcotics.

Today on Gotham, historian Mason B. Williams interviews Shannon King ​about his new book Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (New York University Press, 2015).

Few, if any, New York neighborhoods have been studied as intensively as Harlem, and no period in Harlem’s history has received as much attention as the Roaring Twenties. In his debut book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, the historian Shannon King shows us a less familiar, yet more representative and perhaps ultimately more telling, side of interwar Harlem. In place of the tales of towering intellectuals, brilliant artists (and their canny boosters), and “the making of a ghetto,” King shines a light on the grassroots struggles — with police, landlords, and employers — which collectively “comprised the fulcrum of Harlem’s political culture” and paved the way for the remarkable upsurge of protest politics of the 1930s and 1940s. An associate professor of history at the College of Wooster, King is also a native New Yorker, raised in Harlem and the South Bronx. A Scholars-in-Residence fellowship from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture allowed him to return to Harlem to conduct research for Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Our conversation touched upon the usefulness of the concept of “community rights” in thinking about the Black freedom struggle in the interwar North; the role of gender in shaping grassroots activism; and King’s brilliant analysis of the effect of Prohibition on Harlem’s community politics. Ultimately, King says, he wanted to give the people who waged struggles for justice in 1920s Harlem the recognition they deserved. There is no question that he has done that. And in recasting those struggles as part of a campaign for community rights, he has filled in a crucial part of the history of Black politics, both in New York and beyond. — Mason Williams